Books: James Ellroy Confidential

James Ellroy is barking. He is sitting in an upscale restaurant in midtown Manhattan, lampooning John F. Kennedy for his "two minute" sex romps and bragging about his own bullterrier's sex drive when a woman at a neighboring table looks over disapprovingly. So he barks at her. And at the waiter, and at the coat-check girl. Laughing, he barks all the way out onto the street.

Ellroy likes to shock. If you like him that way, fine. If not, he couldn't care less. His new novel, The Cold Six Thousand, uses one of America's most toxic racial epithets right up front. "There's a reason I used that word in the first sentence. I'm warning people: You want a nice book about the '60s, stop right here. You want to know what really happened--read on."

While shooting down a triple espresso--"I need the kick start"--and looking for all the world like James Joyce buffed up on steroids, Ellroy rips into American culture like a chainsaw in an abattoir with the volume turned up. Kennedy? "Jack got what he deserved. He got whacked before the sex got stale and everyone saw him for what he was." Clinton? "I hate him with a biblical passion. He is monstrous and shallow, a cold, manipulative man with a warm front, infantile with women...I would never have done Monica." American innocence? "This preposterous notion that Americans are innocent when this country is based on land grabs, slavery and slaughter of indigenous people. Are you insane?"

He doesn't do innocence. But he does bad guys really well. Having made his name as the latter-day master of noir with books on L.A. cops, murderers and assorted lowlifes--L.A. Confidential, The Black Dahlia--Ellroy began searching for larger game to hunt. He found it in the turmoil of the 1960s, with the assassinations of the two Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. and the drama of the civil rights struggle. "I lived through the '60s, with these great events roiling around me. I never partook, but I always felt there were private stories underneath the public events." In 1995 he published American Tabloid, his inimitable take on what led up to the shooting of John F. Kennedy in Dallas. Its sequel, The Cold Six Thousand, takes the sordid tale of gangsters, pols, G-men, Cuban racketeers and hired killers up to Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968 "and down to new depths."

Although his canvas has expanded, the perspective from which Ellroy views humanity has not. "I discovered politics is crime writ large," says the man who writes off J.F.K.'s assassination as "a business- dispute killing." And he found a new bete noire on the national stage: J. Edgar Hoover, the shadowy FBI director with a basketful of hatreds. "It was the horror of the abuse of power by Hoover and the fact that he went after Martin Luther King--and that King was the one guy he couldn't break--that's what interested me," says Ellroy. In high school Ellroy deliberately shocked others with pro-Hitler views, but he now professes great admiration for King, and argues that underneath it all, both American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand are "deeply moral books. If you show there was a nexus of racism in America which led to the death of arguably the greatest American of the 20th century, Martin Luther King, you are expositing racism on the page. And literature is the explanation of reality through incident."